When comparing Enlightenment vs Gala, the Slant community recommends Gala for most people. In the question“What are the best window managers for Linux?”Gala is ranked 6th while Enlightenment is ranked 17th. The most important reason people chose Gala is:

Gala is designed to be unimposing while still remaining functional and pleasant to look at. By following the elementary OS design guidelines, Gala maintains a very consistent look.

Pro

The Gala compositing manager allows for effects and animations to be used on a window by window basis.

Pro

Works with Gtk client-side decorations

The current bets of elementary OS (Freya) has enabled the use of Gtk client-side decorations.

Pro

Dynamic workspace management

Workspaces are added and removed on the fly so you only have as many as you need at any given time.

Pro

Innovative multitasking

Gala takes some hints from mobile OSes, but handles multitasking in a powerful way designed for desktop. Workspaces and alt-tabbing work well and are familiar, but feel smoother than alternatives.

Pro

Extremely fast

Gala works well on limited-resource hardware, e.g older netbooks and Chromebooks.

Pro

Excellent stability

Despite the current stable release only being on version 0.2, it is very stable.

Cons

Con

Ugly default theme

The default theme is rather ugly so it's necessary to apply a new theme as soon as you install Enlightenment.

Con

Sub-menu does not change direction when out of space

When you right-click for the menu in the right part of the screen but there is insufficient space for the cascading menu, you have to interrupt your selecting and move your pointer to touch the right edge of your screen - this manually moves the menu over to the left a little bit, so it has space. If there is a sub-menu, you have to once again move your pointer to the extreme right edge of the screen, for it to move over - and so on, for each level of sub-menu.Every other OS and app/program in the world today, simply changes direction to where the sub-menus cascade. Whether that be upwards because it's too close to the bottom (we see this in the selection menus in our browsers in forms, or to change sides as we are accustomed to in all programs). This is logical, universal, expected behavior. But not in e17.

Con

Non-tiling

Overlaps and spaces between windows are both pointless.

Con

Minimal set of utilities

Enlightenment only comes with the bare essentials, meaning there is little that can be done upon first install in comparison to other more fully featured desktops. This does, however, leave all the customization of what apps to install up to the user, which may be a plus to some and is directly comparable to most other bare bones Window managers.

Con

Hard to install on some distros

While Elementary OS has Gala built-in, it might be difficult to set it up on certain distributions because it's tailored to Elementary OS only. Arch, for example, only supports Gala via AUR at the moment.

Con

Limited configurability

Configuration options are few and far between and require editing settings with dconf editor.

Con

Not very lightweight

Although it certainly does not eat up CPU or RAM, it is not as lightweight on resource usage as awesome, i3, openbox, for instance. This shouldn't really be a surprise however.

Con

Buggy with nVidia Graphics

It's fantastic with the Intel integrated graphics; however, it is not good on nVidia ones

Con

Does not render well under AMD graphics

The underlying compositor is know to have issues with AMD graphics cards, leading to poor performance, stuttering, and graphical artifacts.

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